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Chapter three Learning to Be Free In this chapter, I will shift our focus from aesthetics to epistemology, mapping Whitehead’s stages of education onto the theory of knowledge he develops in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. The parallels are to be expected; learning, after all, is a process of coming to know things. Whitehead is an empiricist insofar as he argues that the sole sources of our knowledge about the world are our sense perceptions. The ways in which we experience reality—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling— tell us not only about the external realities we perceive, however, but also about ourselves as perceivers. We learn something about who we are and what it is to be human in learning about how we come to know the things around us. This connection is captured in the commonplace metaphors we use in characterizing what we know about people. We say, when we think them ignorant, that they are blind to the truth; when arrogant, that they lack a common touch; when boorish, that they are culturally tonedeaf ; when deceitful, that what they are doing smells bad. The better we are at understanding the character of our sensory experiences, the more they tell us truths about the character of reality and our own character. Learning and perceiving are closely related enterprises, and if this is so then comparing them should be a useful undertaking. Under normal conditions, looking at a rock or listening to a bird is so familiar and spontaneous an experience that we take what we are doing for granted. Physical disabilities, difficult environing conditions, emotional intrusions, or mental distractions, however, often force us to pay attention to what we are doing, to wonder what we are seeing or what we just heard. What are these things in our world such that sometimes they are as plain as the nose on our face and sometimes incomprehensibly mysterious? Who are we such that we can know so much and yet fail to know so much more? To what extent are these skills teachable and to what extent innate? And what are their limits? 59 60 Modes of Learning In the previous chapter, we have seen how the romance of Art, functioning within the stage of generalization, opens pathways that take us beyond the boundaries of our conventional and usually trustworthy understandings. This chapter makes a similar journey, but uses the more prosaic language of the stage of precision to describe how truth is ascertained and how the increase in competence and judgment thereby acquired enhances a different kind of art, one key to the creation and sustenance of free individuals in a free society. experience The clichés of common sense celebrate the certainties of direct experience. You assure me that a Cassin’s Finch has been seen in a nearby park, but I’m skeptical about such a bird being in our neighborhood, so far from its usual range—until I race over to the park and get a good look myself at it perched in a spruce tree. Seeing is believing. I can put on a dramatic presentation for the garage mechanic about the strange thumping sound that appears whenever I drive my car above sixty miles per hour, but until he hears the sound himself he is likely to dismiss it as merely road noise. For the mechanic, hearing is believing. The proof of the tastiness is in the pudding, the justification for judging the one wine better than the other is its bouquet. We are all doubting Thomases until we have ourselves touched once more what we have loved and yet had thought we lost. Then along come the philosophy professors, undermining this confidence . Our sensory experiences are in our heads, they argue. Images, sounds, tastes, smells, textures are brain states. We think that these mental sensations, these sense impressions, are caused by external realities. We believe that when a Cassin’s Finch vocalizes, it sets in motion vibrations in the air that travel from its beak to my ears and stimulate an auditory sensation in my head that I recognize as a snatch of birdsong. But we know nothing directly about these external causes; we have no way to justify the claim that what we see is like its cause, that our mental image is a snapshot of a portion of the external world. Nor can we even claim that the causes of our sensations are outside our minds. Sometimes we confuse seeing a bird...

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